In an interview with GamingBolton Friday, April 18, Watch_Dogs animation director Colin Graham gave insight to the game’s animation quality and the motion capture process behind the title, touching on the several thousand unique animations for both the game’s protagonist and the pedestrians of Chicago.

“Watch_Dogs has an unprecedented amount of animation to build both Aiden Pearce and The living city of Chicago,” Graham told GamingBolt. “Over the past 5 years we’ve shot over 100 days of Motion capture for the game play team alone. This is spread between the Main Character of Aiden Pearce, the Living city civilians and the enemy AI.” The AI for the enemies in Watch_Dogs has a wide and deep combat system, with distinct mental states and in-depth reactions playing part. There are also almost 4,000 animations for enemy AI.

Aiden Pearce’s Animation were built from the ground up for Watch_Dogs. Aiden has approximately 4,000 animation files in game. Aiden has approximately 2,300 navigation and interaction, and driving related animation files and about 1,700 combat related files.”

Graham also stated that there are over 5,000 unique animations required for the citizens of Chicago in Watch_Dogs to come to life, and that there are more than 13,000 animations needed in total. What’s more, Watch_Dogs has more animation than any other title from Ubisoft.

“There are over 5000 unique animation clips required for the living city civilian simulation in Watch_Dogs,” he said. “Overall there are more than 13,000 animation clips needed to bring Watch_Dogs to life, mainly because the game is a systemic open world game that has to cover a massive amount of contexts with many random elements. Watch_Dogs has more animation than any Ubisoft Production to date.

The biggest difference between Watch_Dogs and previous games in the genre is how much animation is dedicated to the living city,” he continued.“Civilians of Watch_Dogs Chicago have the greatest number of animations in our production. They can have occupational animations, conversations, interactions with the world and reactions to dynamic ingredients, a variety of reaction to various threats, and they come in a variety of sizes, attitudes with different clothing and props.”

According to Watch_Dogs’ creative director Jonathan Morin, Watch_Dogs will have a35- to 40-hour long story mode if players do a little roaming on the side, but completionists can look forward to around 100 hours of content. There is also no planneddemofor the title.

Watch_Dogs will be dropping on Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 on May 27, a release date that was finallyannouncedafter several delays. A Wii U release has also beenconfirmedfor this Fall. Watch_Dogs PC requirements have beenreleased, as well as its Ultra requirements, too.